Adivasi Literatures in India: Disrupting the Norms through Memory, Intersectionality and Critique

Mohan Dharavath   
Assistant Professor, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad.

^{Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 17, Issue 3, 2025. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v17n3.06g
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Abstract

The mid-twentieth century saw the rise of postmodernist literary practices and Black feminist thought, both of which resisted dominant power structures. In India, Dalit and Adivasi literatures parallel global postmodernism but maintain distinct identities. Adivasi writing challenges literary canons by foregrounding displacement, dispossession, and erasure, articulating an ethos shaped by historical trauma, cultural alienation, and resistance rather than mere assimilation into postmodernist aesthetics. This paper examines how Adivasi literatures negotiate with postmodernist literary forms while asserting its unique cultural expression, challenging the reduction of its works to postmodernist frameworks. It examines the features of two Adivasi writings, My Father’s Garden by H.S. Shekhar and Kocharethi by Narayanan, to understand the specifics of their narrative forms and how they develop Adivasi literary expression and voice as they explore the boundaries between fiction and reality, but only as something unavoidable given Adivasi subjectivity that undercuts narration. At the same time, it seeks to understand how the specificities and uniqueness of Adivasi literary expression cannot be entirely subsumed within the postmodernist literary ethos. It also takes the English translation of Narayanan’s Kocharethi as its first text of analysis.

Keywords: Adivasis, Expression, Identity, Literary, Politics, Subjectivity.